The game has it's own merrits, but the problem is, it's like they told us about a fake game, sence Spore is almost the exact opposite of what we were expecting it to be, from what the devs told people. Don't get me wrong, shooting overpowered 2 foot tall red guy remakes on a lava planet filled with poo-shaped rocks is fun, but I would have liked a damned plant editor before Galactic Adventures.

You misunderstand. It's reprisentative of all the features that they said would be from the start of the development, ever since E3 '05. That includes a tool editor, dancting, producural verbs, a water stage, defending eggs while they hatch, a hut editor, less cartoony experiance, realistic looking ecosystems, non-nesting centred gameplay. The way it was shown from the pre-release demonstrations that it was damn near an evolution similator at it's most basic and a procedural world at it's best. Now, compare these expectations with what the game turned out to be. It may seem touchy and harsh, but this forum was founded back in those optimistic days and it continued to have that mindset when the game was finally released.

The spore we got was not the insperation for this community, it was the one we didn't get that inspired it. And SecuRom didn't help either.

You misunderstand. It's reprisentative of all the features that they said would be from the start of the development, ever since E3 '05. That includes a tool editor, dancting, producural verbs, a water stage, defending eggs while they hatch, a hut editor, less cartoony experiance, realistic looking ecosystems, non-nesting centred gameplay. The way it was shown from the pre-release demonstrations that it was damn near an evolution similator at it's most basic and a procedural world at it's best. Now, compare these expectations with what the game turned out to be. It may seem touchy and harsh, but this forum was founded back in those optimistic days and it continued to have that mindset when the game was finally released.

The spore we got was not the insperation for this community, it was the one we didn't get that inspired it. And SecuRom didn't help either.

Exactly. They said it would be in, just like a ton of over features, then screwed us over.

So you got your hopes up early, gained unrealistic expectations based on a unfinished and still very prototypal game, and then got upset when it wasn't the messiah game you hyped it up to be? Figures. Happens a lot when games show previews so long before release, your fandom counts their chickens before they hatch and by the time the real thing shows up the fandoms views are so skewed by years of mystification that its impossible to please their naturally impossible demands. It quite a tradgedy, almost operatic.

Says you. Maxis is a company like any other, and a company's primary focus is profit. They knew what was riding on the game, and they knew what they stood to gain and lose. They did the best they could a probably just fell in the "realist rot." When a project is just an idea, it’s young and full of brilliant life, but the final product is never as good as the imagination, as reality sets in the dream has to be grounded to fit reality, the problem is what you say at E3 '05 was the dream, not the reality, thus you became affixed to the dream and so when reality showed itself, you fell back. The same happens in marriages, elections and immigrations. I'm not shifting all blame from maxis, they should have known never to get the fans hopes up when the game was at such an unfinished stage, from what I've seen, E3 05 wasn’t even real game play, just a cinematic. Likewise the fans should have known never to put so much hope into what feasibly wouldn’t be possible. The same thing happened to the Space Program, it’s everybody’s fault and its nobody’s fault we just have to learn to move on, enjoy what we got, and work to push forward.